Who first of Europeans looked upon this river at the gulf we do not know, but on a Ptolemy map, published in Venice in 1513, it is thought by some that the delta is traced with distinctness, as less distinctly in Waldseemüller's map of 1507. Five years later (1518) on Garay's map of Alvarez de Pineda's explorations, there descends into the gulf a sourceless river, the Rio del Espiritu Santo, which is thought by some to be the same river that Marquette's map showed under the name de la Conception, ending its course in the midst of the continent; but it is more generally thought now to be the Mobile River, and the Gulf del Espiritu Santo to be the Bay of Mobile. Narvaez, as I have said, tried a score of years after to enter the Mississippi, but he was carried out to sea in his flimsy improvised craft, by its resisting current. Cabeça de Vaca may have seen it again after he left Narvaez, but we have no record in his narrative that distinguishes it from any other river. Then came the accredited discoverer De Soto, who found it but another obstacle in his gold-seeking path toward the Ozarks and who found it his grave on his harassed, disappointed journey back toward Florida. It was more than a hundred years after "it pleased God that the flood should rise," as the chronicle has it, and carry the brigantines built by De Soto's lieutenant, Moscoso, with his emaciated followers "down the Great River to the opening gulf," before another white face looked upon this great water. It was in 1543 that Moscoso and his men disappeared, sped on their voyage by the arrows of the aborigines. It was a June day in 1673 that Marquette and Joliet, coming down the Wisconsin from Green Bay, saw before them, "avec une joye que je ne peux pas expliquer," the slow, gentle-currented Mississippi; or, as Mark Twain has measured the time in a chronology of his own: "After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born, lived a trifle more than a half a century,--then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," Hillcrest edition, pp. 19, 20]